How the bridge works, and its risks

The SWARM mainnet is the hub. The bridge service, operated by the SWARM project, holds a shielded wallet on the SWARM mainnet. SWM you send there is locked, and the bridge releases the same amount of the SWM token on Base, BNB Smart Chain or Solana. When you redeem a spoke token, it goes back into the bridge reserve on that chain and the bridge pays SWM out to you.

You trust the operator. The keys that release tokens and pay out coins are held by the project, not by a smart contract or a set of independent signers. If those keys are lost, stolen or misused, bridged funds can be lost. There is no insurance and no guarantee.

SWARM to a spoke chain. Create an order and send SWM to its deposit address from a SWARM wallet. After 240 confirmations on the SWARM mainnet (about 5 hours) the bridge releases the tokens to your address on the chosen chain.

Base, BNB Smart Chain or Robinhood Chain to SWARM. Your wallet calls redeem on the token contract. After the source chain finalises the block, the bridge pays the amount minus the payout fee to your shielded SWARM address.

Solana to SWARM. Your wallet sends one transaction: a token transfer to the bridge pool account with a memo that names your destination. After it is finalised, the bridge pays out.

Spoke to spoke. Redeem on one spoke chain with a destination on another; the bridge releases on the destination chain and the SWARM wallet is not touched.

Deposits on the SWARM mainnet wait for 240 confirmations on the SWARM mainnet (about 5 hours). Redeems wait for finality on the source chain: the finalized block on Base, BNB Smart Chain and Robinhood Chain mainnets, the finalized commitment on Solana mainnet. Payouts and releases follow after that, normally within minutes.

0 % bridge fee. You pay your own network fee (gas) on the chain you send from. A redeem paid out to the SWARM mainnet carries a fixed payout fee of 10,000 zat (0.0001 SWM), deducted from the amount. The bridge pays the gas for releases on Base, BNB Smart Chain, Robinhood Chain and Solana itself.

The bridge enforces caps: a minimum and a maximum per deposit, a maximum per destination address per UTC day, and a maximum per UTC day across the whole bridge. The current numbers are shown on the bridge page, read live from the bridge service. Amounts below the minimum or above the per-order maximum, invalid destinations or paused chains put an order on hold for the operator; refunds are manual. Above a daily cap a release waits for the next UTC day; nothing is lost.

The operator can pause each chain. A deep reorganisation of the SWARM mainnet pauses deposits automatically.

This page reads the token contracts, the Solana pool account and the limits from the bridge service (bridge-api.swarm.green). Builds of this site can pin the token addresses, the Solana mint and the pool owner; with pins set, the page refuses to build a transaction when the service reports anything else. Without pins, a compromised bridge service could show a wrong pool account. Before you sign, compare the contract or pool account shown in your wallet with the addresses the SWARM project publishes on swarm.green.

Until 1 November 2026, 15:42 UTC only the project mines the SWARM mainnet. The confirmation count protects against chain rewrites, but during the closed start the chain's security rests on the project's own miners. Treat bridged amounts accordingly.

The reserves page shows the circulating amount on each spoke chain against the spendable bridge wallet, with the start allocation shown separately (funded and not yet funded), and whether the invariant holds.

The bridge software is new. It can have bugs, the operator can make mistakes, the chains it depends on can fail. Bridge only what you can afford to lose. Nothing on this site is financial advice.